Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Horizon price drop / NSWWC Speculative Fiction Festival

To celebrate the NSW Writers' Centre Speculative Fiction Festival, you can pick up my SF thriller Horizon throughout the month of July for only 99 cents! See the Horizon page for purchase links.

I'll also be appearing at the NSWWC SF Festival on a couple of panels. The festival runs 10am to 6pm on Saturday 18th July at the centre in the the beautiful Callan Park Grounds just off Balmain Road in Rozelle, Sydney.

I'm expecting a small but significant event horizon to form around the venue with the massing of so much talent from the local speculative fiction community such as:

As my alter-ego of publisher with coeur de lion, makers of fine Australian speculative fiction, I'll also be giving away a heap of books including copies of Anywhere But Earth, X6, Rynemmon, and our inaugural anthology from way back in 2006 - c0ck!

The panels I'll be contributing to are -

Can Science Fiction Save the Future? (11am-12am)
This panel examines science fiction as an
agent of scientific and social change, serving as a cultural primer,
preparing us for new inventions, moral arguments or major events, such as
catastrophic destruction or the possibility of transhuman consciousness.
Should SF shake us out of complacency regarding genuine threats to society,
as well as inspiring compelling new possibilities?
Bruce McCabe, Marianne De Pierres, Keith Stevenson (Chair), Joanne Anderton, Stephanie Lai

Short Spec Fic - The State of Play (12-1pm)Tips for navigating a crowded marketplace as both a reader and a wrter, the relevance and place of shorts in the spec fic landscape: a testing ground or the heart of the conversation? Editors and authors discuss the marketplace.
Cat Sparks, Keith Stevenson, Ian McHugh, Thoraiya Dyer, Tehani Wessely

In short, it's a day not to be missed. The cost is $60 for NSWWC members and $90 for non-members. Full details on the NSWWC site.

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SF quotes

"the Culture had placed its bets—long before the Idiran war had been envisaged—on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture."— Iain M. Banks